1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to pathology image analysis and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for stain separation in digital pathology images.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the area of biology and medicine, understanding cells and their supporting structures in tissues, tracking their structure and distribution changes are very important. Histology, the study of the microscopic anatomy of tissues, is essential in disease diagnosis, medicinal development and many other fields. In histology, the process of examining a thin slice of tissue sample under a light microscope or electron microscope is usually performed. In order to visualize and differentiate the microscopic structure, one common approach is to stain the tissue sample with a combination of several dyes that have selective responses to different biological substances. In doing so, specified biological substances such as nuclei, cytoplasm, membranes, other structures, and specific proteins are visually enhanced.
Multiple stained tissue slides (images) are generally used to find the co-occurrence and co-localization of different bio-markers. Traditionally, the stained histology images are visually checked by a trained pathologist. The screening is based on relative color difference and morphological features of the images. The process is slow and expensive. One proposed approach is hand-picking pure dye spectra. This approach is not ideal since the pure dye area may not exist or may be difficult to locate. A second approach uses non-negative matrix factorization, but is a computationally complex and infeasible method. A third approach is color analysis based, but does not account for stain color spectra overlap and leads to loss of stain co-localization information.
Therefore, there exists a need to provide a method and apparatus for improved stain separation in digital pathology images.